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With AI infesting and eating into all kind of crafts--and I being one of those faceless "craftsmen"--I'm rather forced to consider alternative jobs. Setting the monetary rewards aside, I was thinking of jobs that could give me a sense of agency, purpose, and satisfaction (however limited). The few I think of are:

- Parcels delivery driver

- Train driver

- Electrician or plumber

- Mechanic (with auto-mobiles hardly repairable these days, maybe this doesn't qualify)

Surely, I can't be alone in thinking along those lines. What else have you thought of?

Hello Everyone.

Resumes and CVs have a fundamental problem: anyone can write anything. As someone who's been job searching, I've wondered if there's a better way to separate genuine experience from creative writing, I am an engineer at the end of the day not a creative author.

I've been thinking about applying something similar to X's Community Notes model to skill verification. The idea: engineers could "fact check" claims on each other's CVs - not as formal references, but as a crowd-sourced verification layer, where you get a check-mark on your skill like X check mark. If someone claims they're an expert in Kubernetes, other engineers who've worked with them (or reviewed their OSS contributions) could validate or challenge that. Also companies have repetitive interviews, why can't I simply do one interview and be "interviewed" fully for all other companies?

I put together a rough prototype to illustrate the concept: https://skillverdict.com/

Some questions I'm trying to work through(ask more please):

How useful will this be for engineers? Would this create its own set of problems? (gaming the system, bias, grudges) Could it scale beyond personal networks? Would companies even trust community-sourced verification?

Curious what you guys think about the mechanism itself, not the prototype. Would something like this reduce friction in hiring, or just add another layer of noise?

13 years ago, we launched Watsi.org with a Show HN [1].

For nearly a year, this community drove so much traffic that we couldn’t list patients fast enough. Then pg saw us on HN, wrote us our first big check, and accepted us as the first YC nonprofit (W13). The next few years were a whirlwind.

I was a young, naive founder with just enough experience to know I wanted Watsi to be more efficient, transparent, and innovative than most nonprofits. We spent 24/7 talking to users and coding. We did things that don’t scale. We tried our best to be walking, talking pg essays.

Over the years we learned that product/market fit is different for nonprofits. Not many people wake up and think, "I'd love to donate to a nonprofit today" with the same oomph that they think, "I'd love a coffee" or "I'd like to make more money."

No matter how much effort we put into fundraising, donations grew linearly, while requests for care grew exponentially. I felt caught in the middle. After investing everything I had, I eventually burned out and transitioned to the board.

I made a classic founder mistake and intertwined my self-worth with Watsi's success. I believed that if I could somehow help every patient, I was a good person, but if I let down some patients, which became inevitable, I was a bad person.

This was exacerbated by seeing our for-profit YC batch mates raise massive rounds. I felt like a failure for not scaling Watsi faster, but eventually we accepted reality and set Watsi on more of a slow, steady, and sustainable trajectory.

Now that I have perspective, I'm incredibly proud of what the org has accomplished and grateful to everyone who has done a tour of duty to support us. Watsi donors have donated over $20M to fund 33,241 surgeries, and we have a good shot of helping patients for a long time to come.

In a world of fast growth and fast crashes, here's a huge thank you to the HN users who have stuck by Watsi, or any other important cause, even when it's not on the front page. I believe it embodies the best of humanity. Thanks HN!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081

I think I've just had my first experience with an "AI"-driven call centre.

I phoned up with a simple question about a UK Govt. service I use, and got a human being who repeatedly gave me wrong or non-answers in a wierd way I've never heard before. I reckon my voice was being put through voice-to-text feeding a chatbot which was replying in text on her screen and she was reading that text to me.

After a few "sorry, that doesn't answer my question at all" from me, she seemed to put her hands on the wheel to reply "You're not listening to me. I can't help you if you won't listen to me". I said "I'm listening but not hearing an answer." This must have been outside the chatbot's comprehension, because she then hung up the call.

I phoned back, got a different girl... who gave the same non-answers but with immaterial variations - ending with the same result. Total clincher.

This is the future, I guess. "AI"s operating human puppets.

It seems like there will be a lot of hardware that gets discarded every couple of years as new, more powerful systems are made available.

AWS put out a video and article on how it recycles a large amount of its hardware, since it is built for maintainability and repairability.

How true is that? Does it apply to other datacenter operators as well?

What will happen to all the parallel compute cards that will get upgraded soon? They can't be reused as GPU's for gamers, can they?

With everyone using Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and the other 100 AI coding agents that i missed, I’m wondering how much editor mastery still matters like w/ Vim

Being honest the real reason i wanna learn Vim is to boost my ego & assert my dominance, so i can tell people "i use vim btw", but also part of me thinks investing time could still pay off for speed, ergonomics, and working over SSH overall...

but a bigger part also suspects the marginal gains i would gain would disappear when more of the work is delegated to AI anyway, like why would i learn Vim if i'm just going to be prompting Opus all day?

For anyone who's been using Vim for while AND uses AI to code (i'm assuming everyone codes with AI to some degree) my question is: Does learning Vim still meaningfully improve your day to day productivity EVEN with AI, or is it mostly personal preference at this point?

I’ve been working on real time voice agents and put together a write up of what I’ve learned about the full stack including WebRTC media transport, streaming STT, incremental LLM inference, and TTS, along with where latency actually accumulates.

The post focuses on the architectural flow and practical tradeoffs involved in keeping interactions truly real time.

Curious how others are designing and optimizing voice systems.

https://gokuljs.com/blogs/real-time-voice-agent-infrastructure

I have been dealing with a Reddit Ads account issue over the last week, and it has quickly escalated into a severe privacy and security red flag. It appears their customer support tools (or the agents themselves) are actively bleeding PII and crossing user sessions entirely.

Over the last week, I have experienced three separate incidents in their live chat:

Incident 1: Account Cross-Contamination (Feb 14) While chatting with an agent (Sonam B), they managed to associate my personal email to a completely unrelated, bizarrely named ad account ("No Panties Games Ad Account"). When I pointed out they were pasting data related to someone else's account alongside my email, they tried to brush it off as an "error" and told me to "kindly ignore."

Incident 2: Direct PII Leak (Feb 20) Today, while following up on the issue with a different agent (Naheeda M), they inexplicably dropped the email address (info@REDACTED.com) and the full legal business entity name of an entirely different advertiser into our chat.

Incident 3: Total Session Confusion and Misattribution (Feb 20) Just minutes later in that same chat, things got much worse. While I was clearly logged into my own account, the agent told me: "The ad account you're currently signed into is u/TeorREDACTED, and ads are getting published with this username. Is that correct?"

This is no longer just a clipboard issue. This strongly suggests a severe backend mapping failure in their support dashboard (Zendesk/Salesforce or an internal admin tool) that is completely misattributing active sessions, user accounts, and ad publishing data.

If their support agents are seeing me as logged into someone else's account and claiming ads are publishing under that username, it raises massive questions: 1. Are agents making changes to other people's ad campaigns thinking it's my account? 2. Is ad spend being billed to the wrong accounts? 3. Who is currently seeing my billing details, legal name, and campaigns?

Given how broken their Tier 1 tools appear to be right now, I wanted to raise the flag here immediately. Has anyone else running Reddit Ads noticed their support agents leaking data or confusing accounts recently?

I used to love attending hackathons and also participating as mentor/judge at times. With the explosion of vibe coded submissions, 1- the number of submissions has exploded, 2- it's much harder to judge quality of project as it's mostly become judging the quality of tool they used.

I'm not really throwing shade at using ai. There are parts where the vibe coding really shines, such as front-end dev which tends to do a great job at, but anything more complex I'm still not convinced.

gcloud CLI calls are throwing 500 errors { "error": { "code": 500, "message": "Internal error encountered.", "status": "INTERNAL" } }

I'm really tired of the BS, AI, corporate environment and what not.

Looking for alternatives.

In case you're in the same boat:

What do you plan to work with?

Just arrived in SF for fundraising and we're looking for someone that can host us in their office! Is anyone so kind to accept us? Thanks!

I've no expectations for this post to be well-received because it looks down on open-source for being too "pure". Though unless we evolve beyond no-strings-attached open-source, the ecosystem will remain as broken as it is. Why don't our overworked, underpaid open-source developers license their software with something to the effect of "If you make more than $1,000,000, pay me."? JSON designer ("the" JSON) Douglas Crockford had IBM ask for permission to use JSLint, because Douglas had added the note/clause/term "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."[1]

We don't know if GPL works in court. It roughly seems like whatever you write in a license is an effective deterrent though. So your repository could take an existing permissive license like MIT, and add a clause like I mentioned. Set a procedure for your terms for others to use your open-source project commercially. An example of this is the Big Time Public License.[2]

[1] https://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code/

[2] https://bigtimelicense.com/versions/2.0.2#big-business

I’ve been working at YC-backed startups since graduating from university. I’m now at a company building a deeply distributed systems product, and I’m surrounded by incredibly talented engineers who seem exceptionally strong at what they do. They often have knowledge and intuition about things I barely understand.

Lately, I’ve been feeling inadequate — like I’m contributing more to the less exciting parts of the product rather than the “cool” or core engineering challenges.

On top of that, I’m an immigrant and my wife and I are expecting. Balancing that with a fully remote job has been difficult, and at times I feel like I’ve lost some of my competence or sharpness. I’m taking steps to address this — I’ll be speaking with a psychologist soon — but I genuinely wonder: how does someone overcome these feelings while working within a high-functioning engineering team?

Someone I know just had their Google account compromised, but the normal recovery methods don't work for an interesting reason: the attacker has made the account into a "child" account subordinate to an attacker-controlled "parent" account. This apparently blocks the ability to use any of the Google account recovery methods (backup phone number or email address etc) without parental consent.

Apparently this person I know isn't alone, if you search you can find other people reporting they've been victims of this. And of course, Google support is nonexistent for ordinary users, so there's no real recourse. Let this be a warning about the consequences of ill-thought-out "child safety features"?

I see it more and more in email, Slack, text, etc: People too scared to share their own thoughts so they AI-wash it and send an exhausting page of "It's not X, it's Y!" slop instead.

I'm not the CEO, I can't order people to stop. The CEO does it too.

I try talking to people directly, but people get defensive and there's always the chance they didn't use AI. I need indirect means of socializing change.

Looking for anything I can use to socialize against AI-washing: Articles, memes, policies that other companies have successfully used- whatever.

Watching my elderly mother trying to accomplish something on the internet and I have to say ...

Modern website "design" amounts to abuse of the elderly.

It's horrific ... genuinely horrific.

I've now seen her driven to tears, knowing that she should be able to do something, trying everything that seems to be the right thing, and frustrated at every turn.

It makes me so angry.

So. Angry.

The phrase "O Gemini disse" (Portuguese for "Gemini Said") also works, but some times it's from someone that is genuinely paraphrasing Gemini responses.

But searching it in English makes everything more evident, since the phrase starts in English and then suddenly changes it to Portuguese.

I found even a digital news website doing it: https://cenariomt.com.br/mato-grosso/gemini-said-rondonopolis-mobiliza-pit-stop-contra-exploracao-sexual-e-trabalho-infantil-no-carnaval/

I wasn't the one that found out about "Gemini said" text being added when you copy the model response, but I decided to google about it to discover more, and ended up finding those kind of results. I tested on my computer, with Firefox and Chromium on Linux and couldn't reproduce this, so I believe this is something related to Chrome or Windows, since my girlfriend discovered it.

My guess is you use the equivalent of "Gemini said" in other languages too, you might find similar results.

Quick architecture question.

When using MCP servers directly in Cursor, the agent seems to see all tools at the same level.

But when using a plugin/extension that internally connects to MCP servers, does the main agent:

see only the plugin as a single tool and delegate to a sub-agent inside it, or

still see every underlying MCP tool individually?

In other words: do plugins act as a tool abstraction boundary, or just a packaging/install mechanism?

Like what YC partners do at https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs but for the community. What's your personal request for startups, or solutions you'd like to see and you'd pay for?

Querying

https://www.google.com/search?q=polymarket

in Australia leads straight to a crypto scam. The scam website (polymarkets.*) seems to be 'organically' on the top. Perhaps this is because polymarket is banned in Aus?

Generated videos that I see from ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model are pretty ground breaking (compared to Sora, Google Veo and such).

Genuinely surprised not to see a lot of chatter about it on HN!